Happy Hanukkah! The story that celebrates the victory of the Maccabees, a Jewish Priestly family from Modiin that aren’t Israeli, didn’t live in Israel and they defeated the Greek empire that wanted to force them to abandon their faith, their heritage and their G-d.

If I were going to write the story today I would cast Jewish Voices for Peace, J street, If Not Now, B’Tselem, and leftist Jews as the Hellenistic Jews of the Hanukkah story. Because they work against Israel and those that want to live life according to Torah. It’s kind of interesting to me, I recently took a class called “Wrestling With Faith” in it we talked about the Mitzvot. The 613 little holy bread crumbs G-d gave to leave a path for us to follow to find him. You want to get to know someone? You ask him or her questions about themselves, and sometimes getting that information is like pulling teeth. G-d plays no such games with us. He says these things I like, these things I don’t like. You want to make me smile? You want to show you are a child who listen to their father? These are house rules. Which kind of baffles me when people tell me they don’t matter anymore. Maybe I just haven’t found the Parasha where it says G-d changed him mind about those. But that was the point of the Hellenization. To separate the Jews from the things that G-d ask. It’s like doing everything the opposite of what your boss, significant other, spouse or coach says you should do and then expecting them to still feel the same way about you. It doesn’t usually play out that way. So Hellenization was meant to turn people from the worship of G-d to the worship of the human body, art, and pagan rituals. They wanted to convince the Jews living in Israel that they didn’t need to observe the new months, circumcision, Torah study, Shabbat observance. They wanted to drive a wedge between the people and G-d.

For more info on this history of Hanukkah and information you’ll find we’ve got quite a few choices.

It definitely wasn’t safe to openly practice being a Jew in Israel at that time. As other times down through history different people of different nations have tried to eradicate Jews and their Judaism. It never began with cattle cars, concentration camps and ovens. It began with yellow stars and discrimination. At the end of WWII the world joined us in vowing #NeverAgain, and now there has been a self serving attempt to cheapen that phrase by a money grubbing, attention seeking political pawn who is protected by armed guards even as he oinks out that those that can’t afford paid protection be rendered defenseless. Little swine.

Did we think that would be the final attempt after the final solution? Well, it wasn’t.

One of the two new muslims elected to congress. She is leading a group to Israel, but not to visit Israeli Jews, Arabs, Christians and Druze. Nope, to visit the ancient people (est. 1964) Falestinians. The other muslim Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is also no friend.

Tlaib in the interview also came out in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which she said brings attention to “issues like the racism and the international human rights violations by Israel right now.”

Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the other Muslim woman elected to Congress in November, said in an interview shortly after the election that she supports the BDS movement after saying during her campaign that it was “counteractive” and prevents dialogue.

One might think it’s becoming unsafe in America for Jews to openly admit or display their faith. One would be correct. From wonderful Jack Engelhard in a column titled Americas Hidden Jews. This whole column is well worth reading.

Professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Columbia University Elizabeth Midlarsky is about the only one at the college who dares to identify herself openly as Jewish.

Let that sink in.

Remember, this is America. This is New York.

A few days ago she walked into her office to find it vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti. “They got me,” she told The Washington Post. “I’m afraid.

And then we have Airbnb or AirBS depending on if you ask the company or me what their name is. AirBS is a site where people can list property, apartments or rooms they have to rent to vacationers. They have recently decided parts of Israel aren’t in Israel. So any of the Jewish homes listed in Judea and Samaria, the Biblical heartland, were removed. Not the Falistinian ones mind you, they’re still listed. Just not the Jewish ones. Have they done this in any other part of the world where there is dissension occurring? Why do I bother asking? Of course not. It is flat out anti-semitism. Are they being called out for it. Nope.

Remember in the Hanukkah story how a Hellenized Jew was going to sacrifice a pig on the alter in Modiin since Matthias Maccabee refused to do so? Matthias killed the corrupted Jew, and then the King’s officer that was commanding such a thing. There would be no pigs sacrificed on alters in the Maccabee name. The Hellenized Jews were trying to corrupt the pure ones. They’re still active today.

American Jewish peace activists who have spent much of their lives fighting discrimination against ethnic minorities, have decided there is one form of discrimination they support: discrimination against Jews who reside in Judea-Samaria.

Daniel Pipes is determined to make it clear to the Arabs in Judea and Samaria that in order to survive they must recognize Israel.

The Maccabeean revolt was a two fold war. One, it was incredible military victories, G-d gave many many miracles over the years the battles were fought. The other was the war of faith, religion or culture. However you choose to look at it.

I think I’m going to have to disagree with Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks this time. In his Hanukkah message this year he seems to me at least, to believe the great battle was for education, not military battles. I believe without the military battle of G-d through the Maccabees, there would have been no educational victories. To quote Dinesh D’Souza yesterday, he was discussing the difference between George H.W. Bush and President Trump. He said “sometimes you need Mother Teresa, and sometimes you need Dirty Harry”. I would add and sometimes, no one less than Judah Maccabee will do.

I get a weekly newsletter from Rabbi Johnathan Sacks called Covenant and Conversation, this week’s edition is about The Courage of Persistence. It’s always about the Parashat for the week. This week is Toldot. In this newsletter he talks about anti-semitic attacks in the Parashat. When the Philistines filled in the wells of Avraham for example. But a lot of it talks about the dichotomy of antisemitism.

As he points out in Amy Chau’s book World on Fire

Her thesis is that any conspicuously successful minority will attract envy that may deepen into hate and provoke violence. All three conditions are essential. The hated group must be conspicuous, for otherwise it would not be singled out. It must be successful, for otherwise it would not be envied. And it must be a minority, for otherwise it would not be attacked.

He further points out: Hostility to Jews becomes dangerous, she argued, not when Jews are strong, but when they are weak. This is along the lines of what Moshe Feiglin said in his column after the Synagogue shooting in Squirrel Hill.

But there is something more, deeper than the economic factor, which makes us partially responsible for what happened in Pittsburgh. Jewish history is being written today in the Land of Israel. It is clear to all of us that anti-Israel sentiments are the new expression of Anti-Semitism. When Israel is sure of itself, strikes its enemies as it did in the Six Day War, eliminates the hijackers as in Entebbe – the level of anti-Semitism decreases!!! And when Israel displays lack of self-assurance, temporariness, moral flaccidity – a feeling that we are not really on the map, that we are nothing more than colonialists acting only for the sake of self-defense, begging the Hamas for a cease-fire – then our enemies feel that they are just and anti-Semitism flourishes.

Rabbi Sacks continues on,

Antisemitism is a complex, protean phenomenon because antisemites must be able to hold together two beliefs that seem to contradict one another: Jews are so powerful that they should be feared, and at the same time so powerless that they can be attacked without fear.

It would seem that no one could be so irrational as to believe both of these things simultaneously. But emotions are not rational, despite the fact that they are often rationalised, for there is a world of difference between rationality and rationalisation (the attempt to give rational justification for irrational beliefs).

So, for example, in the twenty-first century we can find that (a) Western media are almost universally hostile to Israel, and (b) otherwise intelligent people claim that the media are controlled by Jews who support Israel: the same inner contradiction of perceived powerlessness and ascribed power.

He shows another way that the current situation in Gaza where the peaceful Falestinians so love the land of Israel and long to return to it that they are bombing, setting fire and trying to destroy it.

There is a second aspect of our passage that has had reverberations through the centuries: the self-destructive nature of hate. The Philistines did not ask Isaac to share his water with them. They did not ask him to teach them how he (and his father) had discovered a source of water that they – residents of the place – had not. They did not even simply ask him to move on. They “stopped up” the wells, “filling them with earth.” This act harmed them more than it harmed Isaac. It robbed them of a resource that would, in any case, have become theirs, once the famine had ended and Isaac had returned home.

But in the wake of the shooting at Squirrel Hill, I’ve been hopeful. Why? Because some are beginning to see that self-defense, and defense of others is necessary and right.

This made me a little sad, as did this comment at the end of the article.

“I think he absolutely is generous in what he wants to do,” Ader said. “I think he wants to help and is very well intentioned. It just isn’t for us.”

Arming people, Ader told the TV station, “is a preventative measure, it is not part of the solution at all. The solution is civil discourse.”

I absolutely know he is entitled to his own opinion, but I don’t think he realizes yet that there are people out there that want to kill you, your congregation and there is not one thing civil or un that you are going to say to them to have a dialogue.

Ahh, yes. These times they are a changing. It doesn’t matter how you want to dress that pig up.

Anti-Zionism IS Anti-Semitism

It’s still anti-semitism, it goes way back, it is unreasoning and it’s lethal. It is also much, much harder to implement if the target of your irrational hatred is armed and realizes they have a duty to protect themselves, their families and their community.

A friend of mine asked me after the shooting, “Why didn’t someone shoot the man? Why didn’t they stop him”? I pointed out I didn’t know the gun laws in Pittsburgh, but I rather suspected that being big city on the east coast perhaps they have pretty strict gun control and they had been legislated out of their right to self-defense, and therefore, their right to live. This is what happens when you elect big government, people controlling leftists.

Perhaps the new members of the Second Amendment community will begin to understand a big part of the Second Amendment is fighting to keep it because there are most certainly those that prefer an unarmed populace.

Let’s have a little look at history, shall we? First up Zimbabwe. At one time known as the Jewel of Africa for it’s prosperity. It is now known as yet another country that depends on aide to survive. When the country declared independence from Britain in 1965 the country changed from Southern Rhodesia to Rhodesia. Mugabe became Prime Minister in February of 1980, and opposition erupted.

A) The Fifth Brigade, a North Korean-trained elite unit that reported directly to the Zimbabwean Prime Minister,entered Matabeleland and massacred thousands of civilians accused of supporting “dissidents”.

Estimates for the number of deaths during the five-year Gukurahundi campaign ranged from 3,750 to 80,000. Thousands of others were tortured in military internment camps. The campaign officially ended in 1987 after Nkomo and Mugabe reached a unity agreement that merged their respective parties, creating the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF).

….

Well, off to quite a start for a new “democratic” government with a policy of enfranchisement. So they doubled down.

Land redistribution re-emerged as the main issue for the ZANU-PF government around 1997. Despite the existence of a “willing-buyer-willing-seller” land reform programme since the 1980s, the minority white Zimbabwean population of around 0.6% continued to hold 70% of the country’s most fertile agricultural land.

B) In 2000, the government pressed ahead with its Fast Track Land Reform programme, a policy involving compulsory land acquisition aimed at redistributing land from the minority white population to the majority black population. Confiscations of white farmland, continuous droughts, and a serious drop in external finance and other supports led to a sharp decline in agricultural exports, which were traditionally the country’s leading export-producing sector. Some 58,000 independent black farmers have since experienced limited success in reviving the gutted cash crop sectors through efforts on a smaller scale.

President Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party leadership found themselves beset by a wide range of international sanctions.In 2002, the nation was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations due to the reckless farm seizures and blatant election tampering.The following year, Zimbabwean officials voluntarily terminated its Commonwealth membership.

And how did that turn out? Did it bring prosperity and peace to the country at long last? Um, not so much.

Not that Mugabe will shed tears for Matabeleland any more than he did in the 1980s when he unleashed the notorious 5th Brigade in a genocidal campaign against them. It is thought that these North Korean-trained butchers murdered at least 20,000 Matabele in their so-called ‘gukurahundi’ (the rain that washes away the chaff).

These were not the so-called ‘dissidents’ opposing Mugabe’s one-party monstrosity. They were for the most part ordinary villagers scratching a living in the bundu.

The 5th Brigade gained an horrific reputation for committing atrocities — slashing open the wombs of young pregnant girls, forcing villagers to dig their own graves and then shooting them in them; a mother was forced to eat her own child.

A favourite torment especially for village headmen was to wrap them in plastic bags and set fire to them. I met one such who had survived; he was horribly disfigured with the black pigment burned away from his skin.

Moving on to B)

This time it’s Zimbabwe, so before reaching for the cheque-book, it is wise to reflect on why these people are starving. Mugabe says it is because of drought.

It is not. It is entirely self-inflicted. Zimbabwe has had famine conditions in 2001 (the year farm seizures began), 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008. 2014, 2015 and now! Some drought!

Prior to the seizure of white-owned farms from 2001, Zimbabwe produced 3 million tons of maize (at least those farmers did), almost exactly twice its own needs. This year it is expected to be 600,000 tons, only a third of the quantity needed to feed itself. Zimbabwe has gone from being the breadbasket of Southern Africa to its basket case. Only about 100 white farmers remain from the original 5,000.

And it is not as if the seized land is being farmed. The stated intention was to redistribute the land to former terrorists. Instead, much of it was allocated to Mugabe’s cronies and has lain fallow ever since.

As well as maize, these farmers produced beef of the highest quality, especially from pedigree Herefords. Now it is all gone. The breeding animals have all been slaughtered for nyama (meat) despite their otherwise high value as pedigree breeding stock.

The entire livestock industry has been vandalised. The population of Matabeleland has fallen drastically through malnutrition, Aids, and emigration.

The title of the article? Zimbabwe’s socialist famine. And yet, the ignorant keep reaching for socialism.

When Mafu arrived in Makokoba, Bulawayo was still a prosperous city dominated by the white-owned businesses and farms that made Zimbabwe one of Africa’s richest regions. Two years ago, as President Mugabe’s land grab destroyed the economy, Mafu lost his job as a cleaner.

“When the Europeans were here, we could cope,” he said. “I had money to buy food and a clinic handed out free drugs. Now we have no jobs, no income, inflation is 1,000 per cent and when we go to hospital they ask us for money. If we have none, we are turned away.”

So it’s not like this has never happened, and did anything much happen? Nope, just aide money. Did the UN send peacekeepers? Monitors? Anything?

South Africa

So, the current situation in South Africa. Boer is the Dutch and Afrikaans noun for “farmer”. And being a Boer, farmer is South Africa is now the most dangerous profession in the world. Yes, move over Deadliest Catch.

There have been dozens of recorded farm murders so far in 2017, an average of one farm attack per day, according to South African media reports.

White South African farmers are between two and three times more likely to be murdered than even South African police officers.

They are also more likely to be killed than U.S. troops serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The international average murder rate is 7 per 100,000, he noted. “In the case of mainly white farmers in South Africa, the figure is a staggering 133 per 100,000,”

OY.

The brutality of these attacks is truly horrifying. People are beaten to death, tortured with blow torches, electric drills, dragged behind vehicles, stabbed, raped and the list goes on. But it doesn’t stop with people, from Twitter.

In Magaliesberg, #SouthAfrica, these so called people killed a farmer’s stock yesterday by cutting pieces of flesh from the cattle while they are alive. I get that it is OK to hurt white farmers, but are liberals OK with the animal abuse too, just because the owner is white???

I wish I hadn’t clicked on “more”. It was a picture. I really wish I hadn’t. That of course, is far from the only incident. Torturing and killing animals and the farm families is seen as a way to “nudge” them off the land.

And why would people think they can get away with such heinous crimes? Well, how about because their government is calling for them. From a 2017 article:

“Bury them alive.” ~~Minister of Higher Education Mduduzi Manana

“Shoot the Farmer, Kill the Boer” is a song, sung by both Julius Malema, then President of the African National Congress Youth League and then South African President, Jacob Zuma.

“People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,”~~ Julius Malema

“We are not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now,”~~ Julius Malema

The goal is to drive the farmers off the land, and give it to those the African National Congress decides they want to have it. This is very much communism, and they make no bones about it. The result is you have horrific murders taking place probably daily but the South African Police stopped releasing data on the race of the crime victims in 2007. They also quit caring about the murdered farmers. Showing up at a murder scene was five police cars who thought the farmer had shot intruders. When they found out the intruders had murdered the white farmer, they turned around and left. In fact crimes against the farmers including the murders of the farmers are rarely solved.

But with all the misplaced confidence of a communist, Jacob Zuma blathered

Speaking in Parliament in early March, Zuma called for “black parties” to unite to change the Constitution so that white-owned farms could be taken without compensation to be redistributed.

“We need to take bold steps that will transform our economy, including land ownership, very fast,” Zuma said.

“We are busy amending [laws] to enable faster land reform, including land expropriation without compensation as provided for in the constitution,” he added.

He has all the smarts of a community organizer. Yeah, they’re going to fundamentally transform South Africa. And since the communists in charge have no knowledge of farming they don’t know that you don’t just kill people off, shove them off or steal their land and replace them with people that know nothing about farming and still get food. According to Ilanna Mercer 70% of the land seized by the African National Congress is lying fallow. She also has an excellent column on the tactics being used by state sponsored killers.

Why do I say state sponsored? Because

New evidence that has emerged this year also suggests state sponsorship of the attacks, according to South African security sources.

In a series of security camera images captured by farmers in farm attacks and seen by WND, a group of black attackers carry advanced technological equipment such as cell-phone signal jammers, presumably to ensure that the farmers cannot call for help.

Because common criminals and burglars rarely have the means or the knowledge to purchase or operate such systems, some analysts speculated that rogue members of the South African military may have provided them.

Maybe the farmers should form groups for like mutual defense? Yeah,,,,,they did that.

Authorities also deliberately dismantled the “commando” self-defense units that once effectively provided security for rural areas.

Officials have also made it increasingly difficult for citizens to be armed for self-defense.

On June 7th the Constitutional Court in South Africa, overruled a lower court’s decision that parts of South Africa’s gun laws were unconstitutional. The ruling will force hundreds of thousands of gun owners who didn’t renew their permits to turn in their firearms. There’s no provision for appeal or legitimate reasons for delay, such as hospitalization or death.

Registration, confiscation, communist/socialist government leads to a really bad outcome for some segment of the population. A very old and seen too often story. Genocide Watch currently has the situation in South Africa at 6 out of a scale of 10. Genocide Watch.

Many of those in the corrupt government claim it’s a response to the land being “stolen” from the original inhabitants. Which is pretty much baloney. In the article on the Boers the history states Dutch immigrants first arrived to the practically uninhabited Western Cape of South Africa in 1652. But that’s how communism works, some work hard to build up the land, a business, their families and then someone who knows nothing, and has done nothing is allowed to take it. And in South Africa? It’s done with extreme brutality. Do they think companies are going to be willing to invest money in South Africa knowing that their assets could be seized at anytime by the equality minded communists? They are indeed on the same path as Zimbabwe and Venezuela. I for one, do not want to see American tax dollars going to bail them out. This is what they chose.

When America was accepting all the “refugees” from countries that could give us no information on who was coming in, we never looked at importing the hardworking Boers?

Imports

I don’t really watch TV stations like cnn or msnbc #FakeNews, I have a limit as to how much I will knowingly allow people to lie to me. Thirty seconds on either station goes over the mark. But in the effort to be pretty sure I did a quick search on their websites. The search terms are in the address bars. These atrocities are not being covered at the #MSM #FakeNews stations. Nor should they count on much help from the UN. The UN is very busy with what it considers real human rights problems. This has been going on, and yet, List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel. Well, that certainly puts things in perspective doesn’t it?

One of the facebook groups I belong to will have members that from time to time post links to some pretty egregious anti-semitic posts on facebook or twitter. I know this is shocking considering how many people I know that have done nothing more than post a news article to a crime someone from the religion of pieces has committed and have been put in facebook jail. Usually a violent and bloody crime by the way. So this member posted about 20 links to different facebook accounts. Pretty much all of them had the same thing. A graphic with a knife dripping blood, and a prayer, which, could be translated from Arabic. The gist of the prayer is oh Allah, come a kill all the Jews, let the streets run with their blood, yada yada yada. Being a sensitive soul, I took offense. So I did what everyone else was suppose to be doing with this, we reported it. Wish I had taken a screenshot of it for you, but I didn’t intend for it to become part of a column. The post is now gone happily, but sadly for my multimedia portion of the column. Love those graphics. To my utter shock and amazement, yes I am kidding, facebook said “We reviewed your report of XXXXXXXX” it apparently doesn’t violate their community standards and is not hate speech and they suggest I just block him. Fine, how’s about I use a Centurion tank, s’ok?

Now, why did this rather unsurprising incident wind up in a column? Would you like to know what does trigger facebook’s delicate sensibilities and violate their hate speech rule? The Declaration of Independence. America’s Declaration of Independence.

The Liberty County Vindicator had been posting excerpts of the Declaration of Independence daily leading up to July 4th. The first nine posts were published without a problem. The 10th post, which included paragraphs 27 through 31 of the Declaration of Independence, was deleted by Facebook.

According to Casey Stinnett, The Vindicator’s managing editor, the paper received a notice from Facebook that said the post “goes against our standards on hate speech.”

Hate speech, ok, so praying to Allah to kill all the Jews and blood run through the streets like a gully washer isn’t hate speech. What is?

“While The Vindicator cannot be certain exactly what triggered Facebook’s filtering program, the editor suspects it was most likely the phrase ‘Indian savages,'” Stinnett said in the statement. “Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development’ that would have been better.”

He blamed the incident on an “automated action.”

“The removal of the post was an automated action,” Stinnett wrote. “If any human being working at Facebook were to review it, no doubt the post would be allowed.”

Casey, you have far more faith and trust in facebook than I do. Because I think if the monitoring team had realized it was The Declaration of Independence, they would have gone back and taken down posts 1-9 as well. Harumph, they do after all, have their standards.

I posted a column on my personal blog yesterday. While it was about “gun control,” I thought the tone and expletives made it inappropriate for The Zelman Partisans blog, where I’m a guest. I was angry when I wrote it.

In the past, I have posted here about gunpeople controllers’ screeching for vague or redundant “new” laws to violate human/civil rights. I ask these 18 U.S. Code § 241 lawsuit candidates to be specific as to what solutions they want imposed, instead of whining, “We need common since laws.”

Someone got specific.

So, there’s the first solution. Universal healthcare. Make healthy choice the norm rather than being a country that waits until a sickness is unbearable before seeking treatment.

OK, that’s still a bit general, and it doesn’t seem to have worked particularly well in other countries.

There’s something to the shooters being straight white men. Hellooooo, elephant in the room.

Beg pardon? And what does this person suggest doing about those “straight white men”?

So, an actual second solution. Do away with the old guard. People over the age of 55, for the most part, are only looking out for #1.

Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Eliminating everyone over the age of fifty-five.

Getting rid of everyone over 55yo? That’s roughly 75,000,000 people. Sheesh, Hitler and Stalin were pikers compared to Little Miss Genocide here. But that might make her “universal healthcare” workable; Dr. Zeke Emmanuel thought well of it; when advising on Obamacare, he proposed limiting and cutting off care when people got too old.

Personally, I’m strongly opposed to genocide, hence my affillation with The Zelman Partisans. But if that’s your thing, maybe you should consider other target demographics than “straight white men,” or everyone over 55. Take a look at the UCR data on killer age and race. If you’re into ethnic cleansing, you could start with the 5% of US counties that account for nearly all murders.

Pro Tip: If you want people to give up their guns, don’t tell them you want them dead.

Pro Tip 2: So long as evil like that exists, so will groups like The Zelman Partisans who work to make sure it can’t, that everyone can choose defense.

2 a :sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own

b :the act of allowing something :toleration

3 :the allowable deviation from a standard; especially :the range of variation permitted in maintaining a specified dimension in machining a piece

4 a (1) :the capacity of the body to endure or become less responsive to a substance (such as a drug) or a physiological insult especially with repeated use or exposure developed a tolerance to painkillers ; also :the immunological state marked by unresponsiveness to a specific antigen

(2) :relative capacity of an organism to grow or thrive when subjected to an unfavorable environmental factor

b :the maximum amount of a pesticide residue that may lawfully remain on or in food

Ok, that last one kind of made my eyebrows go up a bit.

There’s tolerances involved in all sorts of things. Sewing, you can be off by like a ¼ of an inch sometimes, gapping spark plugs, there is a set gap, it can be off a little, reloading bullets, ok, so I don’t actually know how to do this, but I’m guessing there is a tiny bit of play. But a lot of things involve a certain amount of give. There is tolerance in how long my horses will stand to have cockleburrs picked out of their manes and tails, this can be influenced with horse cookies, so things can have an effect on the amount of tolerance given or acceptable. There is tolerance in activity, running, reading, tail brushing, for example. Today I was listening to a radio show in the morning. They were talking about the NFL, the national losers and their behavior. The caller thought that since the left seems to be determined to destroy anything in this country with the least bit of masculinity to it, maybe people should just wait for the kneeing phase to blow over as if they were a bunch of spoiled 3 year olds acting out….which, well. Yeah. But the host made his point, the NFL, as a manly sport is gone. The owners by not keeping things professional have allowed it to basically die as the beloved American sport where kids could look up to the felon players. And that the previous things known as “football fans” tended to be pro-America, pro-Military, pro-Law enforcement and they are tired of antifa, tired of rioting, tired of being told to just ride it out, it will get better because it isn’t and this anti-American unprofessional crap is getting on their very last nerve and they are tired of being “tolerant” and fighting by Marquess of Queensberry rules and losing because the left never does fight by the rules, anyone’s. The right has tried to be the grown-ups and be tolerant of other lifestyle choices, beliefs and everything else and they’ve had it. Yep, I hear that.

Then driving home tonight, I was listening to Joe Pags, I like him. He was talking about the security guard from the Mandalay Bay. Actually he was probably more like a parking valet because he was unarmed. An unarmed “security guard”. Huh. Nope, a parking valet that doubles as a walk around bell boy, or regular valet. After the “incident” a few pictures of Jesus Campos made it onto the internet, the heroic security guard. And then he went missing. He was suppose to be on Sean Hannity, and had some other interviews lined up. And he supposedly went to a walk in clinic and then more or less vanished after having canceled all his interviews. Huh. He has since reappeared on The Ellen DeGeneres show. Huh. Well, I suppose it’s a logical choice. Ellen is known for her hard hitting, in depth investigative journalism. Oops, sorry, no, I was thinking of Sharyl Attkisson. So in addition to the baffling choice of venues for his one and only interview, it appears Jesus has been doing some stress eating. So the things Joe was pointing out were pretty interesting. After Jesus went missing, a reporter, Laura Loomer decided after finding that Jesus’s name had been scrubbed from the Mandalay employee list to pay a visit to his house. Which is being guarded by an armed guard working for a security company with a “virtual” address and a business license that expired in January of this year. Huh. Something else Joe pointed out, from the pictures of the guy that were posted on the net right after it happened it appears that Jesus has gained about 70 pounds, in two weeks. It seems that most of his answers on the Ellen show were very well rehearsed. No word if he was auditioning for Harvey Weinstein.

Now I’m a reasonably tolerant person, I think. In my job, I try hard to be nice and kind and helpful to my co-workers and to people I need to interact with. Really, I do. However, I have what is known as a low, and it’s getting lower all the dang time, B.S. tolerance. I will try very hard to be a team player, but, do.not.mess.with.me. It makes me cranky.

And as I’m listening to Joe, and thinking we’re on like the 3rd or 4th timeline now of how and when things happened, the B.S.-O-Meter pegged out.

B.S.-O-Meter

You have a lot of people that were killed, more wounded, theories abounding, immediate calls for more restrictions on the Second Amendment, cases made for gun confiscation, faux Second Amendment groups joining in the chorus for infringement like a bunch of demented Stockholm syndrome victims and the actual knowledge of what really happened and what this was really about is pretty dang thin. I mean, these fools want to bring our country to a point where only the government has guns, or at least regular American Citizens are only allowed a registered .22 single shot if they can prove need, keep it locked up and can only buy one box of registered ammunition every other month.

B.S.-O-Meter

So I thought a short walk down memory lane might be in order. In Chronological order.

December 28, 1890 a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M. Whitside intercepted Spotted Elk’s band of Miniconjou Lakota and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota near Porcupine Butte and escorted them 5 miles westward to Wounded Knee Creek, where they made camp. The remainder of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel James W. Forsyth, arrived and surrounded the encampment. The regiment was supported by a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns.

On the morning of December 29, the U.S. Cavalry troops went into the camp to disarm the Lakota. One version of events claims that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it. Simultaneously, an old man was performing a ritual called the Ghost Dance. Black Coyote’s rifle went off at that point, and the U.S. army began shooting at the Native Americans. The disarmed Lakota warriors did their best to fight back.

The US Army killed about 250 Shoshone during the Bear River Massacre in southeastern Idaho in 1863. As recently discussed in Smithsonian, “200 soldiers under Colonel Patrick Connor’s command killed 250 or more Shoshone, including at least ninety women, children, and infants. The Shoshone were shot, stabbed, and battered to death. Some were driven into the icy river to drown or freeze.”

In eastern Colorado in 1864, the Sand Creek Massacre occurred. There, US soldiers attacked peaceful, unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians “with carbines and cannon, killing at least 150 Indians, most of them women, children and the elderly. Before departing, the troops burned the village and mutilated the dead, carrying off body parts as trophies.”

In 1870, the US Army accidentally killed the “wrong” group of Indians, in the Baker or Marias Massacre. In north-central Montana, along the Marias River, Major Eugene Baker ordered his soldiers to attack a village of peaceful Blackfeet. When informed by a subordinate that this group was not the one the troops were looking for, Baker responded, “That makes no difference, one band or another of them; they are all Piegans [Blackfeet] and we will attack them.” About 175 unarmed Blackfeet were murdered, the great majority children and women.

I can’t find any photos of what the press said about the massacre at Wounded Knee, how they explained or presented it. I did however find a line in an editorial of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer,

“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilizations, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”~~L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum was the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wow, so along with yellow brick roads and flying monkeys L. Frank was totally cool with some genocide. But, at least as a member of the press, he covered the massacre fairly and explained why it was totally necessary. /ticked off sarcasm.

So the Sheila synopsis of this is the government wanted Randy Weaver to do some informant work for them. He declined, they wanted him to do a bit of gunsmithing. He declined initially and finally gave in. Yeah, I’m leaving out tons, but there’s a link above. But the circumstances lead to a stand-off between the jackboots and the Weavers and a family friend. The brave ATF, US Marshals Service, and the FBI found it necessary to shoot an unarmed dog, a 14 year old boy in the back and an especially brave FBI HOSTAGE RESCUE TEAM sniper named Lon Horiuchi scored a major victory when he shot 43 year old Vicky Weaver in the head as she stood at the back door of the cabin holding her baby. I don’t think that the FBI has a good grasp on what HOSTAGE RESCUE means. Cause that sure as hell isn’t it. The Boundary County, Idaho, prosecutor indicted sniper Lon Horiuchi for manslaughter in 1997. Both the Weaver family and Harris brought civil suits against the government over the events of the firefight and siege, the Weavers winning a combined out-of-court settlement in August 1995 for $3.1 million, and Harris being awarded, after persistent appeals, a $380,000 settlement in September 2000.

If they wanted to arrest Koresh, why didn’t they just do it when he went into town every morning?

On February 28,1993 overly aggressive and highly militarized agents of BATF set out to put on a “big show” to increase their budgets and prestige by attacking the Branch Davidian religious group outside of Waco, Texas. Six months earlier, agents had spurned David Koresh’s attempts to cooperate with their investigation of his gun business by inviting them to see his guns. On February 28, when he came to the front door and tried to cooperate, reckless agents shot him and mortally wounded his father-in-law. Other agents started shooting from helicopters, killing four Davidians. Agents probably assassinated another Davidian who approached Mount Carmel later that day. And so began a 51 day standoff.

So apparently Clinton, Reno and Congress saw no need for a overhaul of how to handle, or not escalate situations in the year since Ruby Ridge.

Now we’ll just move up to more recent history.

Does anyone remember a couple years ago the country seemed to have a spate of outlaw ranchers that the DOJ, BLM and a host of federal alphabet soup felt the immediate need to bring to heel?

Bundy Ranch April 5, 2015

Demoncratic President Barry Sotero aka Barak Obama (so does anyone know, did he finally ever legally get his name changed? Yet?) Attorney General Eric “Gunwalker” Holder

The pared down version is a 67 year old cattle rancher in Nevada has been running cattle on the same land his family has for over a 100 or so years. He is actually the last rancher in Clarke county these days due to the “management” practices of the BLM. The BLM-g* demanded he cut his 900 head herd to 150 head. Well, I don’t suppose a obama headed BLM-g would have any better idea of business than anything else he had anything he touched. Besides, they had to save the desert tortoise. The same desert tortoise the BLM-g was killing. Of course, the BLM-g was also killing Bundy’s cattle. BUT NOT ON PURPOSE!! They screeched! No, they just separated the calves and cows and the calves starved to death. And they “might have had to put down a few of the cows” for humane purposes, no doubt. This time, as opposed to Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas, patriots have been getting a belly full of seeing the government obliterate their neighbors for some reason. And they showed up. And the BLM-g went after them as well. Although in most of the court cases the charges were thrown out.

People were attacked at this government siege,but no one died. A pregnant woman had attack dogs set on her, Ammon Bundy was tasered twice, many of the Bundy’s cattle were killed and stolen by the BLM-g, but no one died. First Amendment zones were set up, which were the only places citizens were allowed to film and were located far enough away no one could film what the BLM-g was doing. The Governor of Nevada was not happy about that, but well. And those attacks I mentioned? They occurred on public lands. The public was attacked on public lands by the BLM-g and their law-enforcement cronies. That being said, the local sheriff and his deputies refused to take part in attacking citizens or stealing cattle. But, no one died.

Well, this one just makes my head hurt. Basically the Hammonds like the Bundys, are the last Ranchers in the area. They own a chunk of land in the middle of an area where the BLM-g have managed to run out all the other ranchers. For those that don’t know this, it’s common to burn off a pasture from time to time. It gets rid of growth you don’t want and your crops or grass will come back better and stronger, with fewer weeds. It also keeps the undergrowth and trees burned off. So when something like a lightening strike hits you won’t have the massive fires like what we are seeing in California right now. And that’s partly why we’re seeing them in California. Because of “environmentalists” people aren’t allowing people to keep things burned off and clean, so when you get a fire, you get a doozey. So in the course of burning off some fields, the fire jumped onto BLM-g land that the Hammonds were leasing. This happened a couple of times, a total of 140 or so acres were affected. The 73 year old Dwight and his son Steven were sentenced under a terrorism act. I’ve read enough to know that the BLM-g have also set fires, including back burn like what the Hammonds set in one instance to try to stop a fire started from a lightening strike burning even more. And the BLM-g fire has gotten out of control and cause large amounts of damage and no charges were ever brought in those cases. A judge reduced their sentence from five years to a few months for both of them, stating he didn’t think the anti-terrorism statute they were sentenced under applied. They served their time. And then the government decided they hadn’t served enough, and so the case went back to the 9th Circuit and the 9th Circus judge said the Hammonds had to serve the whole thing. No BLM-g ever served time for causing far more damage.

People showed up to the party. The Malheuer Wildlife Refuge was taken over.

But in this stand-off, someone did die. LaVoy Fincum. While the press often portrayed the protesters and wild eye lunatics, this article is a bit more sympathetic to Mr. Fincum. His death still raises many questions as some people feel he was basically shot in cold blood as he had his hands up.

This BLM-g seizure of ranch land is going on all around the country now. These grazing fees they talk about are not piddling little fees, and if the BLM-g wants your land, they raise them to unaffordable.

But the press does not side with the citizen if there is a Demoncrat President at the time. No word on how they would side if it were a Republican President in office.

These are unelected government agencies that are ruining lives, and seizing control of valuable farming and ranch land. Where is the recourse?

And so now we have Las Vegas, a myriad of questions and few answers coming from the government. Many are dead, or wounded and the predictable full throated cries for more gun control, gun confiscation and no one even asks “And if there had been other assailants in the crowd you don’t think having some concealed carry holders in the audience would have saved lives?” Nope, just demands to take rights from people that have committed no crimes. And this little walk down memory lane is by no means exhaustive. How the media explained and portrayed it to the public seldom told what was really happening. So excuse me please if I choose to “cling” to my gun and my Tanakh/Bible a little bit closer right now….these sorts of situations tend to bring that out in me. Because right now?

B.S.-O-Meter

*BLM-g is Bureau of Land Management as opposed to Black Lives Matter. Both are rouge organizations where pain and suffering at the set goals. But this column concerned the “government” version so BLM-g as opposed to BLM-a which is Black Lives Matter-“antifa” version.

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at gun control through Jewish history, so I did so for a research paper a couple of years ago, but I think it is all still relevant.

I often hear people say “Oh, but why did this happen?” I think we should look at the question of how things like this can happen, by examining the role of the victim disarmament laws in place during the time period.

As Dave Kopel points out in his paper To Your Tents Oh Israeli weapon control dates way back for a conquered people. From I Samuel 13:19-22: Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, “Lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears.” But every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, or his sickle, and the charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares and for the mattocks, and a third of a shekel for sharpening the axes and for setting the goads. So on the day of the battle there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people with Saul and Jonathan, but Saul and Jonathan his son had them. Mr. Kopel points out that governments must control people’s ability to access weapons by also preventing them from making them. Therefore, there were no Israeli smiths.

Whenever Jews lived with Muslims, they lived as dhimmis. This meant they would be facing many restrictions of common rights. First they had to pay jizya, which is a tax any non-Muslim will have to pay to be allowed to live among the Muslims. In addition to that, the Jews living amongst the Muslims were forbidden to testify in court cases if the case involved a Muslim, nor were they allowed to bear arms.ii These restrictions enabled many attacks against the helpless Jews to succeed.

The May Laws in Russia carried many restrictions for the Jews. In some of the areas where pogroms took place some of the Jews attempted for form self-defense groups, but they would be disarmed by the government who appeared to have been involved in instigating some of the pogroms. Firearm registration for all was introduced on April 1, 1918, and in October of 1918 all firearms, ammunition and sabers were ordered to be turned in. The exception was Communists were allowed to keep their weapons. Pogroms in Russia occurred 1881-1884, 1903-1906 and 1917-1921 with each wave of pogrom being increasingly violent towards Jews.iii

Nazi Germany is the easy to use to illustrate how restrictive gun laws can be used to control a population or discriminate against or eradicate a segment of it’s citizens. The Nazi government kept good records. In 1928 the Weimer Republic enacted the “Laws on Firearms and Ammunition”. These laws stated that a person had to have a government permit to do each of the following: one to own or sell a firearms, one to carry firearms (including handguns), one to manufacture firearms, and professionally deal in firearms and a separate one to buy ammunition. Then the government decided who got them based on it’s decision if a person was “trustworthy” enough and if they could demonstrate what the government decided was a good need. This would be the 1928 German version of what is advocated by some in America currently as “Universal Background Checks”. If at some point the government decided they didn’t want someone to have a weapon or ammunition, they simply didn’t renew the permit. In September 1935 the “Nuremberg Laws” were enacted and the Jews lost their civil rights. On March 18th 1938 the “Nazi Weapons Law” was enacted. No Jew was allowed to own or work in a business involving firearms. Kristallnacht occurred on November 10th, 1938. On November 11, 1938 the Nazi Weapons Laws was broadened and no Jew was allowed to own a weapon, any weapon, not just a gun. Since the permitting system had been in place for some time the Nazi government knew who had what weapons, they were marked with serial numbers and where they could be found. This ensured that the Jews, who by now were not considered citizens of Germany could do little to resist the coming attacks.

An interesting note is that America’s “Gun Control Act of 1968” was based on the “Nazi Weapons Laws”. Senator Thomas Dodd was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials and brought back a copy of the Nazi Weapons Laws. He had it translated by the Library of Congress. He then pushed for similar legislation in the “Gun Control Act of 1968”, which was signed into legislation.iv

The results of these type of laws are made very clear as by the end of our class observance of Yom HaShoah and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will both have occurred.

Some of the Jews trapped in the Warsaw ghetto formed defensive bands and attempted to fight back. They realized they would not succeed for long, but they fought for their honor, and for the chance that some of them might make it out alive. The Yad Vashem web site has interviews with the survivors of the uprising and they talk about the pitifully small amount of weaponry they had available and their lack of training or experience. But they wanted that chance, that chance to live.v

The British attempted to keep the Jews disarmed in the forming state of Israel

On more than one occasion the British soldiers retaliated against the Irgun by rioting and attacking Jews and Jewish owned businesses. The British also turned a blind eye to Arab guerillas sneaking into Israel, or even knowingly armed them by supplying arms to TransJordan. Indeed there is a long history of attacks upon Jews in their homeland by both Arabs and British. These attacks were either ignored by the British or they made attempts to cover them up, as in the Hebron massacre. Even after the Hebron massacre the British refused to allow the Jews to arm themselves for protection. vi

Israel would seem to be a country that would understand the need for a armed populace. They have not been that way to the extent it might be thought. On July 31, 2013 Public Security Minister MK Yitzchak Aharonovitch called for tighter restrictions on firearm ownership.vii A little over a year later after the massacre at a Jerusalem Synagogue he called for relaxing controls.viii

Moshe Feiglin former MK, also called for easing restrictions on firearm ownership for citizens. His sentiments were expressed with the statement “The answer

is that the State of Israel is not increasing our liberties; it is reducing them. Dictatorship confiscate citizens’ weapons. ‘The State alone will take care of all your security needs’.”ixIsrael does have soldiers throughout the country that ride public transport with their weapons. There has still been many attacks on unarmed citizens in Synagogues, streets, and shops when one was not close enough to stop the attack before casualties resulted.

Europe has seen a rise in antisemitism over the last few years. In 2014 the Metropolitan Police have recorded a 120% increase in antisemitic crimes, but hate crimes are generally under reported. A Human Rights Watch article reported “the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency found that three quarters of respondents living in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Sweden, and the UK felt antisemitism had increased in the country where they lived over the previous five years.”x Both Europe and the United Kingdom have very restrictive firearms laws, and yet attacks appear to be increasing on the defenseless as evidenced by the above statistics.

The divide between the church and the synagogue, that certainly played into the role of the attacks on Jews in Russia, the Spanish Inquisition, Germany and the Muslim countries. In those instances there were attempts to force them to convert to either Christianity or Islam as an alternative to torture and death. In the case of Germany, conversion was not an option as the Nuremberg laws defined who was or was not a Jew. Conversion was not offered or relevant, it was based on heritage. In this case, the church played a role

in terms of helping the Nazis and spreading antisemitic thought. The recent attacks do not appear to be related to the divide between the church and synagogue, but are based solely on hatred of Jews, because they are Jews. But throughout time and country one thing has remained the same. The laws in place restricted Jews from being able to carry out the Torah commands of self-defense such as Exodus 22:2-3 and defense of others Leviticus 19:16. Finally there is the law of pikuach nefesh. In the case of saving a human life, it trumps all others. It’s hard to obey G-d’s law when you are prevented by man’s, to paraphrase Rabbi Dovid Bendory.xi

On the morning of December 29, the troops went into the camp to disarm the Lakota. One version of events claims that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it. A scuffle over the rifle ensued and by the time it was over, more than 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota had been killed and 51 were wounded (4 men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300.

Yesterday was the 28th of Iyar, the day on the Hebrew calendar celebrating Jerusalem Day. One of the results of the Six-Day war, another attempt to wipe Israel and her Jews from the face of the earth. After the Arab attack on the new state of Israel Jerusalem had been divided. Access to holy sites under Jordan was non-existent for Jews.

Upon its capture by the Arab Legion, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was destroyed and its residents expelled. Fifty-eight synagogues–some hundreds of years old–were destroyed, their contents looted and desecrated. Some Jewish religious sites were turned into chicken coops or animal stalls. The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where Jews had been burying their dead for over 2500 years, was ransacked; graves were desecrated; thousands of tombstones were smashed and used as building material, paving stones or for latrines in Arab Legion army camps. The Intercontinental Hotel was built on top of the cemetery and graves were demolished to make way for a highway to the hotel. The Western Wall became a slum area.

In direct contravention of the 1949 armistice agreements, Jordan did not permit Jews access to their holy sites or to the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

Before the start of the war, Israel sent a message to King Hussein (not barry) of Jordan, that it would not attack Jerusalem or the West Bank if Jordan stayed out of the fight. Jordan believing the false reports from Egypt couldn’t wait to join to be part of the pack ripping Israel to pieces. The result was the reunification of Jerusalem.

Jews once again had control of the holy sites, the strong voice of Motta Gur rang out

“We’re sitting right now on the ridge and we’re seeing the Old City. Shortly we’re going to go in to the Old City of Jerusalem, that all generations have dreamed about. We will be the first to enter the Old City…” and shortly afterwards, “The Temple Mount is in our hands! I repeat, the Temple Mount is in our hands!”

And about 15 minutes later Moshe Dayan gave it….ok, I’ll stop.

But to me, it seems G-d took this attack on Israel and turned it around for good. A miracle. That leads to other miracles. Because of the 1967 victory, people like me can take photos like this last week.

The Western WallShalom, peace, שלום

I can place a piece of paper in the Kotel with prayers on it. Prayers that include TZP, her team and her members and readers. Prayers that G-d will bless you all, abundantly.